While working as Apple’s first creative director in the 1980s, Tom Suiter embarked on an unusual errand. For a marketing campaign, he travelled to Kurt Vonnegut’s Manhattan apartment toting a Macintosh computer and taught the famous novelist how to use the strange, beige box.
Some three decades later, the California-based branding guru founded a start-up essentially offering to deliver that same service. Launched in May 2015, Enjoy is an e-commerce site that offers timely and personalized delivery for tech gadgets.
While the product selection on its website is limited—select phones, tablets, speakers, drones—Enjoy’s selling point is its delivery service, explains Suiter. “Our product is our people,” he said this week at its New York City headquarters.
Enjoy’s people or “experts,” as its crew is called, will not only hand deliver orders at a specific time, but will go through a product’s features and show customers tricks for using their new gadgets. When delivering iPads and iPhones, for example, Enjoy’s staff, (many of whom formerly worked at the Genius Bars in Apple stores) will even research apps based on the customer’s needs.
In the age of expedited shipping and one-hour Amazon Prime deliveries, another delivery service may seem superfluous, especially for New York City and San Francisco, the first two cities that Enjoy serves. But Suiter contends that the human touch has made a big difference, not just for customers but also for the brands who sell their products through Enjoy’s website. Compared to the average 22% product return for online purchases in the US, Suiter says that only 1.4% of Enjoy customers have returned their gadgets.